If you take the time to read some forum posts, most people have multiple accounts on psn for downloading from each territories store. This is done because, while some demo's are released in all areas at the same time, most are just released in one or two specific regions at a time.
For example Ninja Gaiden sigma came to the USA store two months before the European. Ratchet and Clank and Uncharted similarly so, though the delay may have been less. To get round this, fevered gamers not prepared to wait are making more than one playstation network account in the required territory. This seems to only require a valid post code for the region to work. So far so good, no harm done.
Indeed, there is never any real harm done here, but is it a sales pitch? Are Sony counting each account as a separate person in their numbers for amount of users on psn. If so we can probably half the number of users for a more accurate statistic of total conscious human users on the psn.
It does seems that Sony are actually trying to foster this practice so that they can claim a larger amount of users than there are to use as a bargaining chip then they talk about xbox live. We have x million users in our first year, xbox live had x million less in it's first year etc. How do Sony seemingly unwittingly foster this, they release demos in differing territories and then wait weeks before releasing them to the others, why?
The only reason can be localisation, now i understand that for Europe this can be a headache, surely a multinational with the resources of Sony can help the game developers of their biggest franchises to do this quicker so that demo's can be released simultaneously in each store.
From my own point of view there is no excuse for delaying from the Us to the Uk, we both speak the same language after all. Hell give the rest of europe the choice to download the english only version early if they want most Europeans can speak english better than I can as their second language.
Sony have the power to see where a playstation is in the world when it's online, they can close the loophole that allows you to make multiple accounts. If they actually didn't want you to be able to do it then you can be certain it would be harder to do.
So there is my point, maybe at the start it was just something they never thought of, and then they saw it. Picture the scene, two guys deep in Sony HQ staring at their server's screens.
Admin: "Look, that guy from Europe just made a usa account?"
Boss: "What did he do that for, never knew you could!"
Admin: "He's getting that demo for ninja gaiden from the store."
Boss: "Send in the lawyers!"
Admin: "Hang on the demo is free."
Boss: "Oh, ok, hang on a second, so he now has two accounts?"
Admin: "Yes, two accounts, one person."
Boss: "That means we can say that the number of users on psn is higher than it is
Admin: "I suppose so, look, when I search there are hundreds of people doing it, also for the Japanese territories too."
Boss: "Tell no one, i have to go and revise the demo release schedules, ha ha ha."
There they have it, a loophole generated by their users that they can legitimately use as a claim for user number figures and have deniability when someone calls them on it.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
Well, I'd rather they do that, than force you to cancel your account. Sony don't seem to mind the use of multiple accounts at all. Once, when the Uncharted demo came out on the US PSN store, it was accidentally region-locked so that users outside of the US couldn't download and play it. Sony then fixed the problem, so that people outside of the US lying about their location could play it.
Sweet deal, if you ask me. For Sony and their customers.
and the fact that most users don't know they can make multiple foreign accounts pretty much destroys your argument.